Rivers of the Night-Chapter 411: Rupture

The White Veil rushed out of his training room, sprinting over to Elder Pipen’s immortal abode. But when he got there, he didn’t find the Elder where he would usually be.

Panicking, the White Veil didn’t quite know what to do. There was no way that he could gain access to an Ancestor Veil, and he didn’t have a relationship with any of the other Elders.

Luckily, as he was losing his mind, Elder Pipen suddenly appeared. The latter seemed to have a gloominess hanging around him, but the White Veil was too preoccupied to notice enough to rein his words in. The moment he saw him, he spoke.

"Esteemed Elder Veil! My Mandate Mark! It’s been broken!"

Elder Pipen paused for a moment, taking the words in. However, the first thing that came to mind wasn’t that Theron had escaped. In truth, the only reason the White Veil was panicking was because he didn’t really understand what the Elder and the Ancestor Veil were trying to do.

Elder Pipen’s first reaction wasn’t panic at all, it was instead elation. Did all of the pain he had been through finally bear some fruit? If that was the case, this was huge!

"You will be amply rewarded for this!" he said in a hurry before vanishing.

Rather than rushing toward the prison, Elder Pipen was actually rushing toward the Ancestor Veil’s living quarters. This was the time to report first and ask questions later.

...

Theron continued to follow the stream, sinking down to near the bottom. He breathed as calmly as he would have on the surface.

In the past, he had only come to the conclusion that he could only do this in Veinsong. Even now, he still only seemed to be doing it in Veinsong, but it had come with a little bit of something... extra.

It felt that maybe soon, he would be able to do this without relying on Veinsong at all.

Suddenly, there was a flash in Theron’s eyes.

’It’s here.’

He pulled his robes open and pulled out a familiar plaque. He had been saving this plaque and hadn’t allowed the slab to absorb it for very good reason. It was just that it didn’t seem to make sense from a third party’s perspective.

However, the moment Theron had touched the plaque—maybe because of his sensitivity to Water Mana and its Laws—but he had sensed something curious.

This plaque reminded him of his Mandate Paths, not because it was aligned with the chilling and heated path, but instead because it was one part of a Mandate Path that had another half elsewhere. In fact, from what Theron could tell, it had another two halves somewhere—or thirds, rather.

What made this interesting was that these plaques were like pieces of one another, existing separately, but in unison nonetheless. If one vanished, the strength of the other would suffer and maybe even crumble as well.

This made Theron wonder...

This Mandate Plaque was so powerful that there were very few that could even begin to meditate on it, and its other pieces were certainly equivalent if not even better.

In addition, it reminded him very much of the Black Clan.

What were the odds, then, that the other pieces of this plaque were in the hands of anyone else? It was almost certainly in the hands of a member of the Black Clan.

So what Theron had been waiting for was just the slightest twinge of a change in the plaque, something that would tell him that the other plaque was currently in use.

Theron actually didn’t know if he would sense it—it was nothing more than an educated guess.

From what he could tell, these plaques helped you to communicate with the Mandate of the Heavens, grasping a piece of it to comprehend for yourself. This made grasping Laws far easier than it would be on your own.

With the way the Mandates were paired, if one was in use, it would certainly cause changes in the related pieces of it. That meant that it might obstruct Theron’s own attempts to use the plaque in his hands right this moment. After all, they were both trying to communicate with the same pieces of the Heavenly Mandate.

It would be a shame, then, if while the figure using the plaque to cultivate suddenly had the rug ripped out from underneath them.

Normally, this would be impossible. A Mandate Plaque shouldn’t be able to be absorbed like what Theron did, and unless one comprehended it fully, even tweaking things in the Heavens themselves was impossible.

But Theron had an ability to do just that.

For the current Theron, the more chaos there was, the better. What he didn’t know just yet was just how much chaos this would cause.

He was only speculating, and none of his plans were truly hinged on this. He just wanted to take advantage of whatever he could to gain a leg up.

But... Ryuss was the seventh-ranked of the current Mandate Leaderboard. However, he wasn’t necessarily the strongest of his generation.

In the previous iteration of the Mandate Leaderboard, his elder brother, Guiss, had been ranked number four. Not only this, but the two had worked together in hopes of gaining both of these pieces together.

The Mandate Guild had very strict rules about this sort of thing, probably knowing of some of the secrets involved in having multiple related Mandates.

But they couldn’t imagine that not only would they offend Ryuss, but they would also...

Theron’s eyes flashed, the slab pulsing to life as the plaque was absorbed by it.

In that moment, he slipped into the slab’s world seamlessly once again, his mind focused on one thing.

The Law of Balance. He wanted to comprehend it.

...

Guiss sat in silent meditation, calming his previous rage. His brother having the plaque they had worked so hard for taken away had left him furious. Right now, cultivation was his only outlet.

But who could have expected that he had only just reached the deepest state when his soul went out of control.

His heart almost ruptured, a projectile of blood coming from his lips.

Updat𝒆d fr𝒐m freew𝒆bnov𝒆l.c(o)m